The United Nations Was Built to Fail

By Zach Kessel

Saturday, October 07, 2023

 

In the Turtle Bay neighborhood of Manhattan, overlooking the East River, stands a wretched hive of scum and villainy like no other in the country. It’s not one of Midtown’s open-air drug-injection sites or the neon hellscape that is Times Square, which is well to the west. It’s the United Nations headquarters.

 

Conservative criticism of the U.N. is, at this point, a given. From the organization’s frequent opposition to American interests in the General Assembly to the legitimization it gives to despotic regimes such as those of China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, there is much fault to be found within the U.N. at present. But it’s worth remembering that its problems are not new. They can be traced back to its inception, when the U.N.’s founders committed a grave mistake that has plagued international relations ever since: the accession of China and the Soviet Union to permanent Security Council status. The ramifications of this unforced error are acutely felt today, as the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China continue to thwart the organization’s founding mission and promote anti-Western resolutions.

 

The outbreak of the Second World War demonstrated the ineffectuality of the U.N.’s forerunner, the League of Nations, which was explicitly established to prevent another global conflict in the wake of the Great War. With an eye toward international cooperation during the early years of World War II, leaders of the Allied powers began meeting to discuss its eventual aftermath. In June 1941, representatives of the United Kingdom and its Commonwealth of Nations, alongside the exiled governments of European countries then under Nazi Germany’s control and an attaché of General Charles de Gaulle — who was then leader of Free France — signed the Declaration of St. James’s Palace. The resolutions within the statement affirmed the signatories’ commitment not just to join together in defense of Europe from Axis aggression but to secure peace well into the future. British prime minister Winston Churchill and U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt built out this vision at the August 1941 Atlantic Conference, resulting in the Atlantic Charter. Although the charter’s drafting and signing came before U.S. entry into the war, it signaled American support for Britain in the fight against the Axis powers and elaborated on the desire to form an international institution to maintain world peace and ensure human rights after the war’s end. A month later, the Inter-Allied Council — the U.K., U.S., Soviet Union, and governments-in-exile — accepted the agreement, which formed the basis for talks at the 1945 Yalta Conference, which in turn led to the establishment of the U.N., with 50 nations signing the new body’s charter later that year.

 

The term “united nations” at that time referred to those states allied against Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy. When it came time to design the U.N.’s structure, which occurred under the auspices of the Allies, Franklin D. Roosevelt took the lead, assigning the states he deemed the “Four Policemen” — the U.K., the U.S., the USSR, and China — the task of negotiating the configuration of the new international body. Out of these discussions came the Security Council, essentially an executive branch for the U.N., and the idea that those four states, with the addition of France, would serve as permanent members with individual veto power over all the chamber’s decisions. Roosevelt contended that “for a time at least there are many minor children among the peoples of the world who need trustees in their relations with other nations and people,” and the most powerful nations were best equipped to provide that stewardship. Of all the decisions preceding the U.N.’s official formation, the choice to include China and the Soviet Union as permanent Security Council members, replete with all the power such a role entails, has proven most unfortunate.

 

It isn’t as though the outcome was unforeseeable at the time. Tensions between Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and his Western interlocutors had already flared somewhat during World War II–era talks, and the USSR had previously demonstrated expansionist desires (the Soviet Union’s subsuming of bordering states and its initial conquest-oriented agreement with Nazi Germany being two clear examples). China, for its part, was mired in a civil war that would ultimately see its government change hands from the U.S.-aligned Republic of China to the Marxist-Leninist People’s Republic. Both the burgeoning Cold War and China’s increasing instability should have been apparent to those within the U.S.’s diplomatic apparatus at the time.

 

From the outset, the USSR used its veto power to scuttle efforts by other U.N. member states to fulfill the organization’s mission. For one thing, the list of nations that initially had their U.N. membership accession processes blocked as a result of a Soviet veto is astoundingly long. More egregiously, the Soviet Union actively impeded the U.N.’s ability to engage diplomatically in some of the world’s more entrenched conflicts. For instance, during a period of civil unrest and violence leading to the Republic of the Congo’s independence, the Security Council considered a measure requesting that foreign governments “refrain from any action which might tend to impede the restoration of law and order and the exercise by the Government of the Congo of its authority and also to refrain from any action which might undermine the territorial integrity and the political independence of the Republic of the Congo.” It was the Soviet delegation, representing a state with designs on exerting influence in sub-Saharan Africa, that vetoed the resolution. When the committee sought to call on the governments of India and Pakistan to “enter into negotiations on the question” of a permanent agreement between the two states with the U.N.’s diplomatic assistance, the USSR nixed the idea. And of course, when the Security Council attempted to call upon “the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to cease the introduction of additional armed forces into Hungary and to withdraw all of its forces without delay” and to affirm “the right of the Hungarian people to a government responsive to its national aspirations and dedicated to its independence and well-being,” the aggressor state shot down the resolution.

 

One would be remiss, of course, in discussing the U.N.’s perfidy without mentioning its treatment of Israel. While much of the body’s animus toward the Jewish state emanates from autocratic member states within the Middle East and North Africa, the Soviet Union bears sizeable amounts of blame. The USSR — though operating under an officially anti-Zionist position — initially supported Israel’s creation, as Stalin believed the socialist-run country would be a natural ally. In fact, the Soviet Union was the first country to grant de jure recognition — though the U.S. had afforded the de facto version thereof — to Israel upon its 1948 declaration of independence from British rule, and Czechoslovakia, which by that point had fallen under the Soviet sphere of influence, was instrumental in providing arms to Israel during the first Arab-Israeli War.

 

That would change, though, when it became clear that Israel was not on the USSR’s side in the Cold War. The Soviet Union vetoed a 1954 resolution calling on Egypt to comply with a previous decision against interfering with Israeli shipping through the Suez Canal, a 1963 resolution condemning the murder of Israeli civilians by Syrian troops, and a 1966 resolution inviting Syria to work to prevent similar acts of aggression while also requesting that Israel participate in U.N.-led discussions on the topic, all at the Security Council. It was also with the support of the USSR and its allies that U.N. General Assembly Resolution 3379 passed, which condemned Zionism as “a threat to world peace” and “a form of racism and racial discrimination,” thereby granting Israel’s enemies institutional backing for their hatred of the sole democracy in the Middle East. Though this was, as mentioned, a move within the General Assembly, it can be reasonably inferred that the Soviet Union’s status as one of the most powerful nations within the U.N. helped shepherd the resolution along.

 

In recent years, since the Soviet Union’s dissolution, the Russian delegation to the Security Council has continued that history of obstructionism. Time and again, when the committee has considered resolutions calling for humanitarian assistance for war-torn Syria, the Russian Federation has cast the veto killing any such action. In 1994, when the U.N. attempted to secure an “unimpeded flow” of “medical supplies and foodstuffs distributed by international humanitarian agencies” to the former Yugoslavia during its series of sectarian wars, Russia said no. As one would expect, Russia has turned down any and all Security Council efforts toward either condemning or mediating the ongoing war in Ukraine.

 

China, for its part, has been no better. Its Security Council track record of malfeasance is simply shorter, as the U.N. General Assembly did not expel the Republic of China, granting the “China” seat to the People’s Republic of China, until 1971. For the most part, the PRC also refrained from using its veto power during the period in which it appeared that engagement with the U.S. and the broader Western world was on the rise. The exception came in 1997, when China vetoed a resolution sponsored by Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the U.K., the U.S., and Venezuela — quite the list — calling for an end to revolutionary violence in Guatemala and international support for the country’s peace process. Since the turn of the millennium, though, China has become more active in opposing resolutions dealing with human rights, humanitarian aid, and nuclear nonproliferation. In 2007, for example, the PRC vetoed a resolution expressing support for “release of political prisoners, a more inclusive, transparent and meaningful political process, free and unhindered humanitarian access,” and other measures meant generally to improve conditions in Myanmar. In terms of geopolitical ramifications, China’s 2022 veto of a resolution condemning North Korea’s tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles and reaffirming the U.N.’s commitment to halting the spread of nuclear weapons may be the most consequential in recent years.

 

Of course, the Security Council is by no means the only U.N. arena with which Americans and their allies could take umbrage. In 2021 alone, according to monitor organization UN Watch, U.N. members elected Belarus to the body’s Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, blamed the West for the entirety of Venezuela’s domestic struggles, named Syria to the World Health Organization’s executive board, held a special Human Rights Council session on Afghanistan without mentioning the Taliban even once, and appointed Iran to the U.N.’s Commission on the Status of Women. But, given the U.N.’s composition, it should be expected that the institution will take measures that the U.S. — and those with a semblance of moral clarity — would oppose. The Security Council, where the vote of one permanent member can stop meaningful work in its tracks, is a different beast entirely.

 

No international organization can perfectly represent all the disparate interests of its members, but the U.N. would likely be at least a bit more effective had the U.S. and its allies not given China and Russia seats at the Security Council table. The U.N.’s inability to fulfill its founding goals, though, is a product of more than mere ineffectiveness. The inclusion of autocratic states among the most powerful members of the organization imbues the body with a moral relativism at best and an entirely backward ethical code at worst. The U.N. is a haven for the most oppressive autocratic regimes on the planet, and its present condition is simply the logical conclusion of its formation.